Wall Street and Tape Storage

T ape storage doesn’t make the pages of The Wall Street Journal very often, but this past year the most notable business journal in the U.S. took time to highlight the increase in use of tape for data protection. Here are some key takeaways:

Increased sophistication from hackers (ransomware) is driving the shift toward tape. Unlike the cloud, hackers have no way to access physical tapes.

Finance, insurance, government, health insurers and other regulated industries have always used tape to keep a digital copy of records. Recently, other companies are starting to adopt similar strategies.

Advantages of tape include longer lifespan (30 years), higher reliability and the ability to archive at third-party locations.

As Marc Langer, founder of Recovery Point, says in the article, “Tape isn’t inefficient or ineffective, but it can be inconvenient. Good security is almost always inconvenient.”

Quantum has continued to invest in tape through supporting the LTO Consortium, which launched the newest version of tape media and drives, LTO-8, in December; designing the new Scalar® tape libraries (i3, i6 and i600); and introducing the Scalar iBlade™ embedded tape server to write directly from Veeam to tape.